Promises…Promises

There are varying degrees of evil, just as there are varying degrees of good – maybe.

When it comes to corporate giants that stampede upon their customers, trampling upon anything and everything they can in order to extract every tidbit of personal information about you that they can – Google is every bit the school bully we all have loathed.

An investigation published by Quartzhas revealed Android phones have been tracking users using cell towers since the beginning of 2017, “even when location services are disabled.” This allows Android devices to send information back to Google.

Quartz rightly points out that this goes “far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.”

ibankcoin notes that even a brand new Android OS phone with no sim card or service plan will report tracking data once the device is connected to a WiFi network or activated

Even devices that had been reset to factory default settings and apps, with location services disabled, were observed by Quartz sending nearby cell-tower addresses to Google. Devices with a cellular data or WiFi connection appear to send the data to Google each time they come within range of a new cell tower. When Android devices are connected to a WiFi network, they will send the tower addresses to Google even if they don’t have SIM cards installed. –via Quartz.com

How many ways can the company whose motto is “don’t be evil” be more evil? Like the endless Black Friday commercials and non-existent deals – plenty. The top 10 ways Google does evil should be enough to drive even the most apathetic of world-wide-waste searchers towards any search engine other than the Google.

Startpage.com and duckduckgo.com are just a couple of alternative search engines that don’t track your every keystroke, query and thought.

There use to be a time when acquiring knowledge wasn’t tracked by corporate slime in order to prod you to buy an item of your personal taste or proclivity; or when you might innocently do a medical search of a very personal ailment for you or a loved one, only to find that now with every visit to any website, what you thought were your private searches are anything but that, with Google’s choice of a treatment for your ailment being gloriously advertised.

If enough folks start to skate by Google and use alternative search engines, maybe the evil can be ignored (or punched in the face, as Ralphie didin “A Christmas Story”) and the school bully becomes blessedly irrelevant.